There’s a story in this book you won’t like. At least one.
The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Theodore W. Allen, 1997. Chapter 4 page 49.
It’s the year 1607 in Virginia Colony. The scene is the dawn of the new America. Dense, vast, dark forests, inscrutable native populations who don’t agree that they’re an inferior race, a total absence of cities, farms, government, policemen, noblemen, kings or proper afternoon tea. But here are these new settler people. All men. All Englishmen. Some imagine that they are rulers because the king “gave” them land. Others came to escape prison or poverty. They’re all here to get rich.
It turns out to be a much harder job than any of them imagined. Turning the forests into a money-making machine was brutal labor. Taking down even one of those huge ancient trees was monumental work. The rulers had to work as hard as the bond labor, and they didn’t like it.
The problem for the ruling class became the problem of getting the bond labor to do the whole job as cheaply as possible. In the beginning those bond laborers arrived with a contract that after 7 years of labor they were promised 50 acres, a suit of clothes, tools, and food to eat as they start up their own farms. It was a compelling deal, but it turned out to be easy for the rulers to break. Especially when bond labor couldn’t read their own contract.
As it happened the rulers had trouble growing enough corn to feed themselves those first few years. Sharing it with their laborers was a terrible annoyance. But starving workers is a poor strategy for getting work done so the dilemma was acute.
Unless they expanded their strategy to include viscous beatings, torture, and legal repercussions that favor the rulers. So that’s what they did.
This is the true historical birthing of the American republic. . .. authoritarian class oppression. It worked pretty well for the rulers, who morphed it into lifetime African American slavery for an even better return. That’s another story you won’t like.